


The Librarians and the Convergence of the Season

by Kayim



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Christmas, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 15:23:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5461364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayim/pseuds/Kayim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the clippings book discovers strange happenings in the north of England in the days leading up to Christmas, the Librarians - specifically Ezekiel - investigate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Librarians and the Convergence of the Season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mnemosyne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemosyne/gifts).



> Thanks as always to my usual beta reader/sidekick/soulmate who no longer laughs at me when I text her strange fic-related questions. 
> 
> And thanks to John Harlan Kim and John Rogers for creating Ezekiel Jones ♥

_A village hall somewhere in the north of England._

Sally Pike peered around the heavy crimson curtain that hung from the rafters, waiting for her cue to come running onto the stage. It was the fourth night they'd performed the panto, and between the shows and the dress rehearsals, she was already fed up of the so-called limelight. She was dressed in an outfit better suited to sleeping in – thin cotton trousers and what was essentially a cropped vest – despite the freezing temperatures backstage. There was only one small gas heater to help combat the typical December iciness, and she wrapped her arms around herself to try and generate a little heat friction.

Onstage, she could hear John, the middle-aged man who was currently dressed up as Widow Twankey, come to the end of his monologue. She took a deep breath and picked up the small metal lamp that she needed for her role of Aladdin, waiting for John’s voice to call out for her.

“Oh Aladdin!” he cried out, his voice high pitched and purposely screeching. Sally wondered if she would forever hear that sound reverberating in her head. “Oh where are you, my darling son?”

Desperate to warm her fingers up, Sally gripped the lamp, rubbing her hands against it as she stepped through the curtain. 

“Here I am, mother,” she replied, deciding to ad-lib a little extra to her introduction. “I do wish you’d stop shouting so loudly though.”

*

PANTO CAST STRUCK BY MYSTERY ILLNESS  
Westfield Express, 15th December 2015

In a completely unpredictable turn of events, almost the entire cast of Aladdin were suddenly silenced mid-performance last night. 

The only performer still able to speak was Sally Pike, who told the Express that she couldn’t understand what had happened. 

“We were about 5 minutes into the show, when suddenly everyone stopped speaking. They were all trying to talk, and were moving their lips and everything, but no sound came out. I was the only one who could still talk. It was the worst thing ever.”

Pike, who had the titular role in the panto, accompanied her fellow cast members to the hospital where a number of tests were carried out. While the doctors state that they were unable to find any cause for the inexplicable silence, they confirmed that within 6 hours all voices had returned to normal. They suspect that an airborne virus may have been the cause.

The panto was due to continue for another three days but has been cancelled and all tickets refunded.

*

The clippings book floated a few inches from the table and rustled its leaves before settling back down.

When no one responded immediately, it repeated the action, this time adding a subtle slamming sound as it closed before reopening to the same page.

“Wow. Who knew a book could be such an attention seeker?” Ezekiel sauntered into the room, shaking his head. The slam had echoed all the way through the Annex and he'd left his game to check it out. “You really should learn some patience.”

Jenkins, appearing from somewhere deep inside the stacks, snorted in what Ezekiel considered a very inappropriate manner. “I’m not entirely convinced that you are the expert in patience, Mr Jones.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’m the most patient person in this whole place. I once had to sit on the roof of a federal building for more than 12 hours waiting for the right time to break in. If that’s not patience, I don’t know what is.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” came Eve’s voice from the hallway.

Ezekiel shrugged. He was pretty sure Eve already knew that anyway, and there wasn't likely to be any proof left after this length of time. He turned to read the page that the clippings book was so insistent about. “A pantomime? Really?”

“Pantomimes are an important and yet under-appreciated form of theatre,” Jenkins stated, even as he gently eased Ezekiel out of the way so he could examine the clippings. “The word actually comes from the Greek _Pantomimos_ , which means imitates all. Pantomimes in both Ancient Greece and Rome were extremely popular. I personally am quite fond of a good Dick Whittington during the holiday season.”

The urge to respond to that was almost too much to bear, but before Ezekiel could even open his mouth, Eve ran into the room and clamped her hand over his mouth. “Just don’t,” she said, shaking her head. 

“Mmmumph.”

Ignoring him, she turned to Jenkins. “Do we need to call Stone and Cassandra back from Timbuktu for this one?”

“Mmmumph.”

Cautiously, Eve removed her hand from Ezekiel’s mouth. “What?”

“Are you sure Timbuktu is even a real place? I mean, who in their right mind names something Timbuktu?”

She put her hand back again, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“I suspect that you and Mr. Jones will be able to handle whatever is happening in a sleepy little village in the Yorkshire Moors,” Jenkins replied with a smile. He glanced over at Ezekiel, who was trying to lick Eve’s hand in order to convince her to remove it. 

“And good luck, Colonel Baird.”

*

“I usually love Christmas. Sitting on the beach, a traditional barbecue with my closest friends and family. A little bit of hacking into the government mainframes.”

Ezekiel hadn’t stopped speaking since the two of them left the Annex and Eve was seriously considering shouting something that would have made her sound more like his mother than his Guardian. The Annex's back door had opened into what seemed to be a public lavatory in the middle of a village square. Wishing she had thought to pick up gloves and a slightly warmer jacket, Eve watched as every word Ezekiel spoke left tiny clouds of breath floating away. 

“This, however, this is not Christmas,” he continued, gesturing around him at the snow that had started to fall. 

Eve smiled. “I thought we’d all gotten over the whole anti-Christmas thing when we met Santa last year?”

“I’m not anti-Christmas. Just.... against this particular form of its appearance. Snow at Christmas just isn’t natural.”

Refusing to be drawn into that particular discussion, Eve ignored him and looked around. The village square would be beautiful in the summer, she suspected, with what she assumed were flowerbeds buried beneath the snow. A large traditional style building (she ignored the voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like Stone’s that tried to tell her it was early Victorian era with a hint of Edwardian decor) stood off to one side, the sign above the huge door indicating that this was the village hall. Posters that looked like they had been printed on someone’s home computer and laminated badly were stuck to the outside wall promoting the pantomime.

“So this must be the scene of the crime,” Ezekiel started walking towards the building, kicking the snow as he moved. “It doesn’t feel especially magical.”

The heavy wooden door was slightly ajar and Eve called out as she pushed it open.

“Hello? Is there anyone here?”

A shuffling sound came from the inside and an elderly man, maybe in his 80s, Eve guessed, came towards them, a broom in one hand and a black bag in the other. “Can I help you?”

Eve affected a tone of voice that she hated using, but knew that it had its advantages. 

“Oh hi,” she giggled, her voice high and – to her mind at least – sounding more like a teenage girl than a Guardian. “We just wanted to come and see the panto. We _love_ plays. Don’t we, honey?”

She addressed this last question to Ezekiel as she slipped her arm through his. To his credit, Ezekiel’s eyes widened for only a split second before he understood his role.

“Absolutely,” he replied. Eve fought back a grimace as she listened to his attempt at an American accent. It sounded like a bad cross between a Bronx hardened criminal and a Californian surfer, and would never have convinced any American. On the other hand, she knew that most Brits were unable to tell the difference between American and Canadian accents, so she hoped they'd get away with it. “We came all the way from New York for a traditional English Pantomime, and everyone said this was the best one in the area to see.”

The man looked back and forth between them, brow furrowed in suspicion before finally responding. "The panto’s been cancelled.”

“Aw, shucks.” Eve gave an over-exaggerated pout.

Ezekiel patted her hand, before turning back to the man. “I don’t suppose we would be able to have a quick look around the stage area, would we? You know, just to see where the magic happens.”

The man’s frown deepened. 

“We wouldn’t touch anything, I promise,” Eve smiled, slowly drawing a cross over her chest. The man followed Eve’s hand _very_ carefully and she swallowed a shudder.

“Okay,” he agreed. “But only for 20 minutes. And don’t touch anything.”

Eve smiled and gently tugged at Ezekiel’s arm until they were both already walking towards the back of the hall. “Thank you so much," she said over her shoulder, complete with a final hair flick.

Behind them, they heard the man’s shuffle fading away and Eve dropped her hand from Ezekiel’s arm.

“Let’s agree to never speak about that conversation ever again.”

“Oh god, so agreed,” Ezekiel replied with a sigh of relief. 

The backroom was dark, lit by a single bulb hung from the ceiling. Shadows filled all the corners, making it resemble more a shop of horrors than a magical fairytale. “So, what do you reckon happened? You think that old dude is a magic user who cursed the whole cast in order to stay young and beautiful forever?”

Eve raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, maybe not,” he conceded with a shrug. “But there’s got to be something around here that caused it. Or some signs of someone having used a magic spell.”

“And why did it affect everyone except one person?”

A cell phone began ringing. Eve and Ezekiel checked their pockets simultaneously, with Eve holding hers up triumphantly. She answered it and switched the speaker on. 

“Jenkins. What’s new?”

“I’ve been doing some research.” They could hear papers rustling in the background of the call. “It seems that the village has been performing the same pantomime every year for more than 70 years. A local newspaper article from a couple of years ago states that they are even using some of the original props from that first performance. “

“One of which may or may not be magical?”

“I expect so, Mr. Jones.”

“Well it’s obvious, isn’t it? The lamp.”

“Not possible,” Jenkins replied. “I told you once before, it’s never the genie’s lamp.”

 _Don’t argue with him_ , Eve mouthed at Ezekiel before he could respond. “Okay, we’ll concentrate on the props and see what we can find.”

“He’s in denial, you know that, right?” Ezekiel said as she hung up.

Eve slid the phone back in her pocket and gave a small shrug. “Jenkins usually knows better than us about artifacts.”

“But think about it. A lamp that grants wishes. An _old_ lamp. The only person not affected by the magic spell was the one person _most likely to be holding said lamp_.”

“Well there’s one easy way to resolve this. We find the lamp.”

*

“This is not an easy way to resolve anything,” Ezekiel complained, his voice muffled as he rummaged in a chest filled with brightly colored scarves. “We’ve been searching for hours.”

Eve pushed through a rack full of clothes (and more than one dust bunny) and looked over at him. “We’ve been at this for less than 10 minutes,” she corrected. “Now go and check over there behind the stuffed wolf.”

“Why do they even have this?” he asked as he stood eye-to-eye with the over-sized creature. “There’s no wolf in Aladdin.”

“I’m not convinced there’s much of a call for an outfit like this in any pantomime either,” Eve replied, holding out a tiny scrap of material that made the metal bikini from Return of the Jedi look almost prudish in comparison. “But there it is and here we are.”

Ezekiel sighed. “Maybe we could just wish for the lamp to be here?” he suggested, peering over the wolf but pointedly not touching it. “Although I don’t know if that would work as you have to rub the lamp. I should try it anyway.”

He stood up before Eve could even think about stopping him. “I wish I had the magic lamp in my hand right now.”

There was a sudden bright flash of light, and Eve spun around, half expecting him to vanished or be burnt to a crisp or something similar. Instead, he was wearing the biggest grin she had ever seen, and held an unimpressive traditional-looking lamp in his hand.

“Ezekiel 1. Jenkins 0,” he crowed. 

“There’s no way that should have worked,” Eve muttered under her breath.

“And yet it did. Next up. I wish we were back in the Annex.”

*

When they appeared in the middle of the room, Jenkins dropped his teacup.

“Hey, Jenkins,” Ezekiel rushed towards him, holding the lamp out. “Guess what!”

Jenkins shook his head. “It can’t be. It’s impossible.”

Eve bent down to start picking up the broken china cup. “You might have to explain your insistence a little bit this time, Jenkins,” she told him. “After all, it’s looking pretty possible to me right now.”

“The reason it can't possibly be the genie's lamp,” Jenkins said with a sigh, “is because there was only ever one genie who lived in a lamp and granted wishes. And he no longer lives in a lamp.”

Eve and Ezekiel both looked at him. 

“He currently resides in a nice little retirement condo in Florida and is going by the name of Jonathan. And no, I’m not giving you his address.”

Eve laughed. “The genie from the lamp is living in Florida,” she repeated. “Of course he is. Why on earth didn’t I consider that possibility?”

“Because it’s a ridiculous possibility?” Ezekiel replied. He turned back to Jenkins. “But I wished that we could be back here and it worked. If the lamp isn't what granted my wish, how did that happen?”

Jenkins was slow in responding. “I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted, shaking his head. “Perhaps there is something else in the village hall itself that could be granting the wishes?”

They were interrupted by the sound of the back door opening. Jake and Cassandra fell through, landing in a heap on the floor. They were closely followed by a dagger that fractionally missed Jenkins and embedded itself in the wall opposite. 

Eve ran to the door and slammed it shut, keeping her back to it, even as she checked over her two charges. Both were disheveled, with Cassandra’s usually perfect hair tangled and knotted, as though she’d been crawling through a jungle for days. One sleeve of Jake’s shirt was torn away, a large cut visible on his arm, although the blood around it had now dried. Both of them laid on the floor panting.

“Ancient temple,” Jake managed to mutter, barely lifting his head from where it had fallen. 

“Bad guys with knives,” added Cassandra, rolling off Jake’s legs and onto her back.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” replied Ezekiel, turning his back to them and turning the lamp upside-down to check for any magical inscriptions or instructions or secret codes. “We’re trying to find out why wishes are coming true in England.”

Both Jake and Cassandra visibly perked up. “Wishes coming true?” Cassandra asked, already dragging herself to her feet, reaching down a hand to Jake who followed her up. 

“Yep,” Ezekiel confirmed. “But it’s not the genie’s lamp” – he waved the lamp uselessly at them as a demonstration – “so we need to find out what’s causing it.”

Cassandra ran her hand over her hair as if to try and straighten it. Ezekiel sure as hell wasn’t a hairdresser, but even he understood that this particular mess would need more than just a run through with a comb. 

“Can you do your brain grape thing and see if anything looks odd about the village hall?” he suggested to her, seeing Eve wince out of the corner of his eye. He knew that Cassandra had always said she hated referring to it as a brain grape, but he’d noticed her using the term herself more recently. He didn’t think that she’d grown to accept it, exactly, but she was becoming a little less scared by it. Which made sense to him – he’d always been told to face his fears, even if he hadn’t always managed to follow the suggestion.

She nodded and Ezekiel went to power up the door again. 

“I think I might have to sit this one out,” Jake said as he leaned heavily against the table. His cut had opened again and was dripping blood down his arm. Eve rushed towards him and slipped her arm around his waist for support. She nodded at Ezekiel to let him know that she was also staying, if only to stop Jake from trying to follow the second they left the Annex.

Ezekiel watched as Jake stripped off the torn and bloody shirt he’d been wearing and replaced it with a clean on that Jenkins had offered him. If the other Librarian was going to show off like that in the middle of the room with no shame, then Ezekiel Jones was going to take full advantage of it. Distractedly, he saw both Eve and Cassandra doing the same. 

Jenkins coughed.

“Yeah, sorry, village hall, here we come.” Ezekiel hit the switch and the door came to life.

*

The second they stepped through the doorway, Cassandra stopped as though she had slammed into a brick wall.

“There’s so much power here,” she muttered, her hands already raised up in front of her, fingers flicking through images that only she could see. “Ley lines intersecting, magical power travelling, slipping, sliding, like jello, jello, jello.”

“Cass?” Ezekiel reached a hand out to her and placed it on her shoulder. He knew that forcibly snapping her out of one of these _trances_ wasn’t a good plan, but he also knew that she was better able to keep her focus if she was grounded by someone else. 

“So many ley lines,” she whispered, her voice soft and gentle, almost singing the words. “All converging here, in this one place. So much magic accumulated right here. No, right there,” she corrected herself, hand pointing at the village hall.

She blinked and snapped back to reality in the blink of an eye, turning her head to look at Ezekiel. “It’s not an item in the village hall that’s magical,” she told him, her voice back to normal now. “It’s the hall itself.”

“Crap. Well we can’t exactly pick up the hall and take it back to the library, can we?”

Ezekiel reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, hitting the speed-dial for the Annex. “Jenkins, new theory,” he said as soon as the call was answered, without waiting for any of the pleasantries that Jenkins always insisted on. “We think it’s the village hall itself that’s granting the wishes.”

On the other end of the line, Jenkins hummed thoughtfully. “I suppose if the hall happened to be situated within a high concentration...”

“A ley line spaghetti junction,” Ezekiel interrupted. “Yeah, we already figured that one.”

“Well in that case, we need to find a way of decreasing the magic flowing through the building.”

“That makes more sense than my plan of trying to bring the hall to the library somehow.”

Cassandra leaned over his shoulder, getting herself as close to the phone as she could. “How about we look for the focus?”

“That might work.” The reply this time came from Jake, rather than Jenkins. “If you can find where the lines converge, there might be some kind of artifact there channeling the magic.”

“And if we can find that...” Cassandra spoke again.

“We can steal it,” finished Ezekiel, with a grin on his face. “Awesome. We have a plan.”

*

“This is a crappy plan.”

The old caretaker had recognized Ezekiel from his visit with Eve earlier on, but to his credit, had barely batted an eyelid at the sight of Cassandra this time. He’d simply sighed, and allowed them access to the backroom again.

“There’s so much stuff here. It could be anything. How are we going to find whatever it is we’re looking for when we don’t even know what it is we’re looking for?”

Cassandra smiled at him, somehow still looking beautiful despite the bird’s nest hairstyle and the smudge of dirt across the bridge of her nose. “It will have to be something that’s been here since the start. Something old, that’s not likely to be thrown out. A piece of furniture maybe, or artwork or...”

“Or how about a stone plaque that was part of the original foundations of the church that stood on this exact location for centuries before it burned down and was replaced by this village hall?”

“That’s rather specific,” Cassandra muttered as she turned around. 

Ezekiel waved his hand at a piece of stone embedded into the wall. It was about a half meter square in size with a chiseled inscription that repeated his last comment almost word for word.

He snapped a photo on his phone and sent it over to the Annex. Cassandra was still running her fingers across the lettering when a quick buzz indicated a reply.

“Stone says it’s probably this. Jenkins says he’s already making a space for it in the library.”

Cassandra was still touching the stone. “I can feel the power in it,” she said. “At least I think I can. I could be imagining it. Or it could be the brain grape.” 

She smiled at Ezekiel as she spoke the last words, and he mentally patted himself on the back for his awesome social skills that had figured her out.

“All we have to do now is find something here that can carve stone, and get it out of there before the caretaker dude comes back and kicks our asses for destroying ancient property.”

Cassandra let her fingers fall away from the stone and started doing one of her mental calculations in the air. “By looking at the exact placement of the stone in the wall, and calculating the density of the surrounding brickwork, I should be able to pinpoint three or four weak spots.”

She reached up and pointed at three locations around the edge of the stone. “There, there and there,” she indicated. “If you make a small crack in the brickwork at those points, the stone should be released.”

“Or the building will come tumbling down around us,” Ezekiel muttered under his breath, even as he looked around for some kind of hammer. He found one, covered in cobwebs and dust, and brought it over to the wall.

“So what do you think will happen when we remove this?” he asked, gingerly making the first hit – a very soft tap. 

“I’m not completely sure,” Cassandra admitted. “Either all the magic will disperse and no more wishes will ever be able to be made. Or it will bring the magic down to a more controllable level and the occasional wish will still be able to be made.”

“Oh, hey, wishes!” 

Ezekiel dropped the hammer on the floor and turned to smile at Cassandra. “I wish that the plaque was out of the wall and in my hands.”

Another flash of light, this one brighter than the earlier ones, filled the room, and Ezekiel suddenly found the very heavy stone plaque in his hands.

“Ugh. Not my best plan”, he said, struggling to hold it up. “But it worked.”

“There’s no way that should have worked.”

“Yeah, Eve said the same thing last time. Weird, isn’t it?”

With both of them sharing the weight of the stone, they headed back for the door. As they stepped outside, Cassandra squealed with delight as they discovered flakes of snow falling around them.

“Still not Christmas,” Ezekiel insisted as they walked. “I wish you guys could experience a proper Christmas. Then you wouldn’t get so excited over a little bit of frozen rain.”

*

Jenkins leaned into the room, watching Eve as she rearranged the items on Flynn's desk once more. 

“Are you joining us, Colonel Baird?”

“Sure, why not. This damn desk is only going to reset itself as soon as I walk away.”

“Excellent,” Jenkins replied. He held out a tall glass containing some kind of cocktail with a bright yellow umbrella perched in it, and offered Eve his arm.

Together, they walked out of the Annex, this time through the front door, into the bright sunlight of the afternoon.

“I still can’t believe this weather,” Jake was murmuring as he stood in front of a grill, wearing an apron decorated with a large Santa Claus face on it, even though they all knew Santa looked nothing like the jolly man in red. He was carefully turning what appeared to be an abnormally large turkey leg. At least Eve hoped it was turkey. In the library, it could just as easily have been a Velociraptor. 

“An unprecedented heat wave on Christmas Day,” Eve said, looking around for Ezekiel. “I wonder how something that _magical_ could have occurred.”

“Don’t look at me,” Ezekiel replied. He was sitting on a deck chair with his laptop open, fingers dancing over the keys while he spoke. Eve really didn't want to know what he was doing. Plausible deniability. “We’d already removed the stone from the village hall. There’s no way I could have caused this.” 

Cassandra, from her position on a beach towel, sat up, propping her sunglasses on her head. “He’s right about the stone,” she confirmed. “But I guess it means that there’s still some residual magic left in that hall.”

“Or it’s just a crazy coincidence and we should all enjoy it without questioning,” Ezekiel suggested. He placed his laptop on the floor and walked over to the table to snag himself a candy cane, singing softly to himself.

"Silent night. Holy night. All is calm. All is bright."


End file.
